I just got my 23andMe results back (got in just before the FDA letter). My health results were reassuring- I am at lower risk for Alzheimer’s and macular degeneration, two of my big worries.
My ancestry results were pretty obvious- this blonde haired blue eyes girl is indeed from Western Europe and Scandinavia.
But two little blips were a surprise. Apparently I have .10% North African ancestry, which isn’t that shocking. I could picture some nice Berber making his way into Europe. But it also claims I have a little smattering of Japanese ancestry. Indeed, it seems pretty sure of it.
Could this be possible? I think the Japanese ancestor would be around 1750 or a little earlier. Was Japan even open to the West then? Wouldn’t said mixture be very unusual? Is there documentation of half-Japanese folks in Europe at that time? I’m not counting out that this could be a mistake, but I’ll admit the possibility is interesting.
There is a Southern Spain lastname, Japón: the people who have it are supposed to be descendants of a group of Japanese envoys (not sure of the century, I’ll look it up, but I think the 17th). Recent genetic testing confirmed it, much to the surprise of the Japones themselves, who thought it was just some sort of joke. ETA: yep, 17th, and it was led by Hasekura Tsunenaga (see “Second visit to Spain”).
A foreparent from Coria del Río (link in Spanish) could have brought both the Northern African and the Japanese.
Very interesting. How cool is it that genetic testing is confirming these histories?
I don’t seen to have any Southern European ancestry, though. It’s something like 35% English/Irish, 35% French/German, 8% Scandinavian, and a bit of Eastern European. All of the non-specified ancestry is Northern European. From my family, I have an Estonian great-grandfather and an Irish great-great grandmother. I’ve heard unlikely rumors that my last name is Portuguese, but I guess that’s not true.
The last post contradicts the OP, and if you think Rosario Flores can’t pass for Moroccan… may I suggest glasses? A single Andalusian sailor hooking up with a woman in Southampton, Biarritz or Hamburg is all it would have taken for the double package to enter the family tree. Can’t be one of the guys who stayed in Ireland after the Invencible sunk, wouldn’t fit the timeline… but those are also a possible source for some of the Northern African.
You don’t have DNA from all of your ancestors, and not all DNA is distinct to a particular region. It’s possible that you had ancestors from somewhere in southern Europe who in turn had Japanese ancestors, but that through the luck of the draw, you happened to retain a recognizable trace of the Japanese without a recognizable trace of the southern European.
Ok, so the Spanish connection is a possible scenario. Interesting. I am still having trouble scrapping my head around the idea that it could happen without a hint of identifiable Spanish ancestry, but it probably beats the other improbabilities I’m thinking of.
I’m glad I did this. I’m not at all a huge genealogy fan, but it is interesting to think about. I expects surprises, but I thought it’d be some surprise Jewish or Native American ancestry. I can’t think of anything more improbable than Japan!
I don’t think I would rely on such identifications from 23andMe without knowing much more about the specific genetic characters that were identified. A sequence that is typical of Japanese ancestry may not in fact be exclusive to that population. (And note that even if it is a Japanese character, it may not have arrived in Europe via an individual from Japan. Conceivably it could have come via an intermediate population, such as a Mongol invader.)
(This said, genetic analysis will sometimes reveal big surprises. I recently attended a lecture by an Italian geneticist who said that as far as he knew his ancestors had been in Italy for a thousand years. Yet genetic analysis showed he had both Jewish and Mongol ancestry.)
Good point. I’ll have to hold off on applying for Japanese citizenship. The results show on their conservative analysis, so it seems somewhat credible. I’ll have to do more research.
It looks like any Japanese ancestry would likely have to come from one of the very few early visits (I would have some evidence if it were through, say, mongols, right?). There really aren’t many other options. There is a small amount of Eastern European ancestry (3.5%). Would it be possible that a random Russian with Japanese ancestry snuck in?
Would say that the W European or N African route is more likely. Indian ocean trading links are quite ancient and the Dutch especially spent quite a while in those parts.
There was an interesting article in The New York Times yesterday about these genetic tests. A writer submitted samples to 23andMe, Genetic Testing Laboratories and Pathway Genomics. 23andMe said that she had elevated risks for psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis, while one of the other companies said that she was at the lowest risk for those diseases, among the diseases they tested for.
I think we need to make a distinction between the health risk assessments and the genetic population background analysis. The FDA was only concerned about the health risk assessments because the links are not well proven/supported by research. That could account for the reason that different services offer different health assessments.
(And, Even Sven, why you might want to take your assessments as tentative.)
But I don’t think there is the same kind of controversy around the genetic population background analysis. The NYTimes article does not seem to be interested in that part of DNA analysis.
Roddy
Yeah, I’d take any info from that outfit with a grain of salt unless I knew a lot more about how, exactly, they came to that conclusion. In the OP’s case, it’s also possible that Native American ancestry might be mistaken for Asian ancestry.
I’d ask anyone who said that how they could possibly know where all their ancestors were living 1,000 years ago. Besides, there Jews living in Italy then anyway.
The concerns about the health issues, IMHO, are aimed at people who don’t know about statistics. It’s true that their health analysis is not definitive and based on sketchy methods. But the health results will get better with time and participation, and in any case you’d have to be pretty clueless to construe them as medical advice.
My understanding of the ancestry is that they learn from results of people with known ancestry. So for Japan they would take a bunch of people whose grandparents are definitely Japanese, and look for consistence differences from others. Obviously not foolproof, but that result was categorized as “conservative”, rather than “standard” or “speculative”, so if it is an error I would guess it’s an error in analysis of my sample, not methodology
And the result is definitely “Japanese.” They have other categories for Native American or non-specific Asian/Native American.
So they are starting by presuming that certain people are who they think they are. Guess it makes sense to take a statistical sample of some cultural population and assume that the majority of the current population’s DNA comes from the progenitors of that culture. But still, the genetic marker analysis is statistical. A marker is Japanese if it is strongly associated with Japanese people. Obviously this has shortcomings, but ideally will get better and better as more DNA is added to the study.
There are a huge number of other options, and you would be very unlikely to find evidence of Mongol ancestry.
As far as other options go, people were far more mobile throughout human history than we give them credit for. We tend to think that East Asia was opened up by Marco Polo in the age of exploration, and before then it was a separate world. North Africa tends to treated much the same way.
But the fact is that there was continuous trade between China and India for millennia, with genetic crossflow,as well as crossflow via the Himalayan and Siamese regions. There was also extensive trade between Indochina and China. Similarly, there was continuous, direct trade between the Ethiopia and surrounds and India, going back at least 2, 000 years. As the crow flies, the distance between the horn and India isn’t all that far. There was also trade between India and Indochina.
So you could quite easily have Japanese ancestry via India and North Africa. Or from Muslim traders to Indonesia. Or from a Dutch or Portuguese trader to Malaysia anytime from 1500 onwards. There are essentially an infinite number of ways for Japanese ancestry to enter European bloodlines.
And don’t think that you would ever know about such ancestry, Mongol or otherwise.
If the route was from Japan-China-India-Ethiopia-Spain, the person who was born in Spain wouldn’t even have a hint of their ancestry. You’re talking about great-grandfather at least. Most people today don’t have a clue where their great grandfather came from, let alone an illegitimate sailor at in 1100. And the fact is that it could have taken 100 generations for the bloodline to make that journey.
But from personal experience I can tell you that, even via recent direct route, you are unlikely to know. I almost certainly have a small amount of “Mongol” ancestry. I can’t remember the date, but it was prior to the 18th century. A Scots ancestor was fighting in Poland. There are records of the family name there at the time. In my case, there also happens to be a single line reference to the effect of “The elder Blake son, who took a Mongol bride”, from a smallish island that my paternal ancestors came from. Putting those two together, I probably have Mongol ancestry.
But the first point is that we just happen to have the offhand reference, written 100 years after the return of the Mongol fighter, to confirm this. The odds of this happening for most of us commoners is remote.
The second point is that we don’t know what a “Mongol bride” was. It could have been a literal Mongol woman who had been captured or defected. It could have been a Russian or Polish woman who had been captured by the Mongols, and was liberated and married a soldier because her family were all dead and she had no way home. Or, because Central Asians raped an pillaged across Poland with some regularity throughout history, it could have been a Polish girl whose grandmother had been raped, and so she looked like a Mongol to the people of Scotland.
But this just goes to show how many ways that “Mongol” ancestry could have entered my (or your) bloodline without leaving any documentary trace.
It’s more than possible. As I noted above, Central Asians have been raping and pillaging across both China and Eastern Europe for over a thousand years. And vice versa. If you have Eastern European ancestry you almost certainly have “Mongol” ancestry.
Doing some research, it appears that they use a mix of 23andMe users of (as far as anyone can tell) known ancestry, as well as publically available data.
Their algorithm for assigning ancestry is pretty complex, and pays special attention to trying to reconcile unexpected results. Apparently the “conservative” estimate is supposed to be at least 90% accurate, and their East Asian samples are particularly precise. Some populations, like, say Sardinians, really are just hard to tell apart, and so they’ll end up labeled as “non-specific European.” But they seem pretty confident in their Asian results, and given Japan’s history I’d WAG the markers used are pretty distinct. So I am going to stick with the idea that I have a 90% chance of having a random distant Japanese relative.
Testing a relative would increase that accuracy significantly. Luckily, it’s piqued my mom’s interest, so maybe she’d be willing to try it (you can still get ancestry results, just not health ones.)